Lovecraft, Cthulhu and The Ood

In this week's reading there are a great many references to H.P Lovecraft and Cthulhu and I thought it would be beneficial to post some artistic renditions of Lovecraft's mythos for those who are not familiar with the Old Ones.



These images are from a collection called The Art of Lovecraft: Artists Inspired by Lovecraft.

More on the collection can be found here:
http://io9.gizmodo.com/5019979/tentacles-and-cosmic-sf-the-art-of-lovecraft

Also for a fantastic documentary on Lovecraft check out Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown (2008). It's actually on youtube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Spoz_1KyZiA

Lastly, for those who are not Doctor Who nerds and have no idea who the Ood are this is what they look like.

The Ood are particularly good figures for the Anthropocene because of their biological vulnerability. They have these hind-brains that are outside of their bodies, attached by a kind of umbilical cord. In addition to the hind-brain, they are connected telepathically to a collective brain. This is what makes them vulnerable to colonization and enslavement by the hu- mans who lobotomize them; when they cut off their hind-brains, they cut them off psychologically from their collective consciousness. In fields like epigenetics and microbiome research, we are hearing new stories about the human body, not as a citadel, but as something porous and vulnerable to exposures. The world passes through us and we are not unchanged. I was wondering what the Ood, who are born with their brains in their hands, can teach us about these sorts of uneven landscapes of exposure that cut us off from what sustains us, and also what prac- tices of resilience...  (Haraway, 268)